Drop Gwibber from default install

[Evan Huus]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:13 PM, Ken VanDine <ken.vandine at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> First thing is to remember the reasoning behind including gwibber in
> Ubuntu wasn't to provide a twitter client, it was for social networking
> integration in the desktop.  Provide an easy way to share information
> with your friends and see what your friends are up to.  This doesn't
> mean the gwibber client user interface providing you a stream of your
> friends activity, but real application integration.  Like a simple way
> to post to all your accounts from the former MeMenu or to share user
> reviews in software center.  Software Center is a great example of why
> Gwibber was included, after you write a review you can choose to share
> your review from right there inside the software center interface.  Sure
> applications can implement the functionality themselves, but that would
> require quite a bit of effort.  To use libgwibber to post, it really
> only takes a few lines of code.  And this type of desktop integration
> really can't be done with the browser.
>

That's cool, and I didn't know you could do that. If we want to go in that
direction though (which I think we do), then we need to do much more to
make Gwibber discoverable. Right now it's hidden either in the messaging
menu (under the not-necessarily-friendly name 'broadcast') or in the dash
where the user has to explicitly search for it.

One possible way to do this would be to add something to ubufox that would
prompt whenever a user logs in to facebook, twitter etc (with the same
style prompt as the 'remember this password'). Someone sitting down in
front of Ubuntu who wants to access facebook will just go to facebook in
firefox and log in. If we then let them know they can use Gwibber for that
and get all sorts of cool integration, I expect usage (and thus, slowly,
contributions) would go way up.

I would really like to see Gwibber get "fixed" as opposed to dropping
> it.  Not because I am now the maintainer, but to continue with the
> original spirit of why it was included.  If nobody cared to fix Gwibber
> I would have no problem spending my time working on other projects, I
> took on Gwibber because the previous maintainer stepped down and I had a
> vested interest because of Ubuntu.
>
> The real problem we have with Gwibber is lack of contributors, we only
> have a few regular contributors all with other responsibilities.
> Fortunately I get to do some work on Gwibber as part of my day job
> working for Canonical, which is awesome.  However, most of the work I
> put into gwibber is in my spare time.  None of the complaints I've seen
> from people are unsolvable, but we need to have a plan and people to
> work on it.
>

To get people interested in fixing it, we need to get people interested in
using it. I haven't historically used it, but only because I thought it
wasn't useful - I had no idea it had all this potential for integration
into other parts of the desktop.

1. More Discoverable
2. More Users
3. More Contributers
4. Profit!


> My proposed solution:  Put together a plan of what needs to be done and
> do a call for volunteers to help work on it.  I do think we can find
> some people with enough interest to do their part.  This is much more
> constructive than just saying we need to drop it.
>
> For those that haven't tried the latest version, I really suggest
> getting 3.3.91 and taking that for a spin.  Most of the effort we've put
> into it recently have been quality, so no stunning changes but more
> reliability.  Duplicate detection and handling of the content.
> Scrolling and keyboard navigation has improved quite a bit, but we
> really need smooth scrolling.  I would say that would be at the top of
> the todo list.
>

I know I'm interested. I have coding experience, but I don't have a lot of
spare time. Still, I'll branch the bzr repo and poke around. A to-do list
(especially with some bitesize bugs for new contributors) would be awesome.

Cheers,
Evan
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